The mayor of Central Park lives in an S.R.O. on the Upper West Side. His one room has an unkempt bed, two small dressers that belong on the curb, lumps of clothes on tho worn carpet, and a rusted hotplate that he means to throw out.– Dave Barry, New York Times, Dec. 3, 2005

I'd never heard the former meaning. Wonder if it's peculiar to New York?

... the economists then converted those [health] benefits into what is called a "quality-adjusted life year." This measure, known as a QALY or "kwah-lee," is used by health economists around the world. A QALY assigns a score between zero and one to a person's health. A person at 1.0 is in perfect health. If a drug that costs $1,000 extends a person's life in prefect health for one year and then the person dies, the drug's cost per QALY is $1,000. Typically, NICE [Britain's "National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence"] believes that drugs shouldn't cost more than $50,000 or so per QALY.– Robert Tomsho, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 22, 2005

In Tess of the d'Urbervilles yesterday, within a few pages: market-nitch, hontish, and teave, none of which occur in either of my big dictionaries. (I'd hoped Hardy was one of those authors every word of gets an entry.)

I don't know the contexts, so these guesses may be well wide of the mark.

Could market-nitch be an alternative spelling of market-niche?

There's a county (and a small village) in Slovakia and northern Hungary called Hont. In Hardy's time, of course, it would have been in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Could hontish simply mean "relating to Hont"?

I couldn't find teave, but there's a word, theave, which means "A ewe lamb of the first year; also, a sheep three years old". Maybe it's a variant?

Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.

From Feist's Silverthorn, we get "the cell had been blanketed by some ensorcellment neutralizing any other magic". Ensorcellment is not a common word, although its meaning as "enchantment" or "spell" is fairly obvious. It only gets 1,610 google hits, so I am surprised I came across it so easily, after thinking the other day about this word(actually "ensorcelled" occuring on The West Wing.

"the most aggressive interrogation technique authorized against [terrorists] is "waterboarding," which induces a feeling of suffocation. That's ruough treatment, but the technique has also been used on U.S. servicemen to train them to resist interrogations.

Sources are not consistent on the exact definition of 'waterboarding', and some define it as being a form of 'torture' -- which of course begs the question of whether waterboarding (whatever it may be) constitutes illegal 'torture'. Here is the definition recently put out by Human Right Watch, asking whether this specific technique is authorized:

In waterboarding, the prisoner is tied head-down on an inclined board, cellophane or a cloth is wrapped over his face, and water is poured over him. The technique produces an overwhelming and agonizing sensation of drowning.

I should add that as best iI understand, the treatment typically lasts no longer than several seconds.

Here's an extract from an article of his in tonight's London Evening Standard:

quote:

The most loathsome of ... innovations is surely the "ethical Christmas gift". Instead of the DVD or handsome pair of socks you'd been hoping to receive, an ecologically-crazed friend posts you a charity card informing you that "the money I would have spent on your present has been used to buy six chickens for an African farmer" or "a camel for a Bedouin tribesperson". And you're supposed to look pleased that he's given you precisely nothing, while he basks in a nauseating glow of smug self-satisfied eleemosynary.

This smug altruism is undermining the true commercial spirit of the festive season, so to nip such dubious philanthropy in the bud, I've launched a range of "Vic's Unethical Christmas Gifts", and it's not too late to send one, by way of revenge.

Imagine the look of surprise on the face of your do-gooding environmentalist friend when he opens his card on 25 December and reads that "the money I would have spent on your present has been used to pour a tankerful of toxic chemical waste into a river in China", or "to hire a poacher to wipe out a rare species of hummingbird in Tierra del Fuego". I guarantee, next year it'll be handkerchiefs as usual.

I'm not too sure if his use of eleemosynary is correct, as the dictionaries only seem to show it as an adjective, not a noun. I'm not going to cavil too much, though.

Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Article title: Vlogger(noun): Blogger with Video CameraToday, essentially all someone needs to make a so-called video Web log, or vlog, is a digital camera that can capture moving images and high-speed Internet access.

... the ununsual virulence of the H5N1 [bird-flu] virus stems partly from its power to make the immune system unleash a torrent of inflammmatory cells and chemicals -- an event called a "cytokine storm." It's a case of good cellls gone wild. A cyto-kine [sic] storm triggers an overreaction by the immune system's first responders ... In a storm, these cells and chemicals overproliferate and run amok, killing not just virus-infected cellls but healthy bystander cells as well.

I don't think that vlog will catch on, probably for English phonotactic reasons and not aesthetic ones. I may be the only word person in the world who was not disturbed by the coingage blog. I like it. It's short and to the point. It caught on like wildfire. In fact, it'd become well established before the pop grammarians got their knickers in a twist.

I posted this in the Modern Coinage thread, though maybe it better belonged here. I read about a reporter's interview asking a coach about his team's "drastic turnaround." The coach replied that he didn't consider it "drastic" really. He'd have to find a measure of "drasticity" and perhaps would have to consult a "drastician." Rare bit of wordplay for a college coach.

Vlog, on the other hand, seems ugly to the English-speaker's ear. The are no native words English words I can think of using those two consonants together in the same syllable. Now, of course, someone will present me with a long list...

Well, I am probably behind the Internet vernacular because I have never heard of vlog before. So I suppose the new one I heard today is common with most of the rest of you:Webliography. Actually, I kind of like it.

This is the perfect place for this post because I'd be embarrassed to start a thread with it.

I read this quote from Ted Turner in a book I am reading: "Millions of women have their clitorises cut off before they are ten or twelve years old, so that can't have fun in sex...Between fifty percent and eighty percent of Egyptian women have their clits cut off...Talk about barbaric mutilation...I'm being clitorized by Time Warner."

I suspect it will never catch on. There are 428 Google sites for it, though most of them seem to either be foreign (?) or sexual.

Not to be pedantic, but surely that should be declitoridized. (The root being clitorid-.) Female circumcision seems a kind of a misnomer. The clitoral hood is the piece of anatomy that is morphologically analagous to the prepuce which is what is removed in male circumcision. The clitoris itself is more akin to the male glans. While we're on the topic, there's also the barabric customs of infibulation in females and subincision in males.

Hello all,I guess this is as good a place as any to do an initial, introductory post---I read the "Tips for new members" thread, but a newbie must get his feet wet _somewhere_ before using any of the "tips." I like the "Words that make you laugh" section on the Homepage: I'm trying to come up with a summary in my own words of the story of "Pogglethorpe" to entertain my wife (a US elementary school teacher) with. She is usually busy with school work grading papers, etc, so at the dining room table or in the car or at some quiet moment I'll tell her a word-story. Halcyon, haggard and sub rosa have been the subjects of recent "entertainments." I've read a few such stories to her right from the computer monitor, but it's not the same thing.I started "looking it up in the dictionary" in 1949, to do the crossword puzzle in the "Wilmington Morning Star" (North Carolina, USA)newspaper, and have always looked up unfamiliar words. My wife calls me her walking dictionary. The truth of the matter is that I've usually read what she is reading and have already looked up the the word she asks about.

I don't understand how that can have happened. The text input box should start to scroll as you type more. I'm not sure if there's a size limit on posts, but if there is it's a lot more than your first post. As you look around the site you'll see plenty of much longer posts.

Oh, and welcome! An apposite nickname you've chosen!

Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.

This month on OEDILF they are workshopping limericks written by people who haven't logged on over there in awhile. That means that some of the limericks, early on, that Wordcrafters wrote are being workshopped, and I am making it a point to look at those. Robert Arvanitis wrote a limerick that had two great words that I'd never heard of:

anthemion - A pattern of honeysuckle or palm leaves in a radiating cluster, used as a motif in Greek art. He used it in this line: "Wooed a lady of beauty anthemion" How nice!andepithalamion - A lyric ode in honor of a bride and bridegroom. Now that's a great word, too.

While looking for words about clothing, I found the word corroboree, meaning "An Australian Aboriginal dance festival held at night to celebrate tribal victories or other events." But I was also intrigued that it can mean "a large noisy celebration" or "a great tumult; a disturbance." Has anyone seen it used that way?

I had never read "84, Charing Cross Road" and found it delightful. Helene Hanff, the author, used the word varlet, which means a "deceitful and unreliable scoundrel." Helene said some playwright used it a lot and she had always wanted to use it. It's new to me, but I like it.

In the recent media reports of the Blackberry settlement, I read about patent trolls. Apparently they are firms that have no operations, just patents.

BTW, did the Blackberry scare cross the pond? Businesses here were all in a tizzy about this suit, fearful that their precious Blackberries would be shut down. I heard of one law firm where the second the settlement was announced, a partner e-mailed everyone about the settlement and said, "There is a God!"

There was a great word used today in a session at my conference. A researcher has worked for the past 20 years on trying to measure quality of life, which is nearly impossible to measure as you might imagine. She called the attempt at measurement "chimera." I found that this word has a Greek origin (khimaira), meaning she-goat. From Greek mythology it is a fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, goat's body and a serpent's tail. But this definition from the Compact Oxford English Dictionary I thought was perfect for comparing it to the quest for measuring the quality of life: "Something hoped for but illusory or impossible to achieve."